Yesterday, I decided to try importing a story to Medium. I’d hunted around for a way to auto-post to Medium from WordPress, which runs the blog portion of meyerweb (the rest is mostly HTML, with a little PHP here and there), and hadn’t found one. Then I found the “Import story” feature on Medium and thought, Sure, why not?

So I tried it out on my most recent post, which also happened to have some code in it, as my posts sometimes do. The process was, as anyone who’s used it can tell you, very simple. Paste in a URL and the content gets sucked in.

Well, except for code blocks.

Everything was imported without incident except the Javascript. That seems like a metaphor for something.

I’d structured the block with a pre element, as I always do, and yet the line-breaking was stripped away. It looks like my indentation tabs were preserved, but without the linefeeds, they didn’t have nearly the same utility.

The real problem is that the importation of the code block stopped cold at the first <, dropping the rest of the code on the floor. Now, I admit, I didn’t escape or entity-ize the character in my source, and maybe that was the problem. Still, I feel like an import tool should be a little smarter about things like less-than symbols on import. Otherwise, how many less-than-threes will end up as just plain threes?

Fortunately, the fix was simple: I went back to the original post, drag-selected the whole code block, copied, went back to Medium, drag-selected the mangled code, and hit ⌘V. Done. It was properly formatted and no less-than terminations occurred.

Today, I’m experimenting with writing my post on Medium first, after which I’ll repost it at meyerweb. This is likely the only time I’ll do it in that order, given my experience over here. Captions are deucedly hard to edit (at least in my browser of choice, Firefox Nightly), the apparent inability to add simple decorations like border to images, and the apparently intentional, active enforcement of single-space-after-sentence even when editing annoy me deeply. (Yes, that’s how I roll. Let’s not have the spacing argument here, please.)

I can see why Medium appeals to so many. It’s pretty frictionless, a lot more so than almost any other tool of its kind I’ve used. I mean, my WordPress install is pretty frictionless to me, but that’s because I invested a lot of time customizing it to be that way. Much like my browser, mail client, and other essential tools.

So anyway, that’s what I found during import and authoring on Medium. Here’s hoping this posts properly, and without the stray “in” that’s somehow shown up in my post, and which I can’t select, mouse to delete or otherwise remove through non-Inspector means. If only I could prepend an “f”!

It didn’t show up when I posted, fortunately.

P.S. I discovered this was the title just before publishing. It was supposed to be just “Medium”. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/07/30/medium-trials/feed/1The Guilt I Carryhttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/26/the-guilt-i-carry/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/26/the-guilt-i-carry/#commentsFri, 26 Jun 2015 13:50:36 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3326Last year, in an effort to help him and many friends of mine struggling with the tragic death of Chloe Weil, I told Jeremy Keith I had let go of guilt over Rebecca’s death, and that was the truth. I mourned, I had regrets, but there was no guilt, because there was nothing we could have done except what we did. Her cancer and death was always going to happen, and the only thing—the only thing—we could have done to avoid it was to have never adopted Rebecca in the first place, thus causing some other family to experience all the joy and sorrow of her brief life. I accepted that, and it brought some small measure of peace.

All that was true. Almost all of it is still true…except for guilt. That came back, seeping into me so slowly that it took me a long time to realize it. When I finally recognized it for what it was, I realized it had been there for months. I also realized it was a particular form of guilt: survivor’s guilt. This came as a surprise, honestly. As it’s usually defined, at least as I understand it, survivor’s guilt seems to be recognized in the parents of children who take their own lives, but not to those whose children die from disease or accident.

If Joshua had asked why I was saying sorry, I would have told him I wasn’t apologizing because I felt guilty, but rather because I was sorry in the sense of sorrowful. Sorry he had to experience the death of his older sister, who died on her sixth birthday of aggressive brain cancer. Who had been gone just about 51 weeks on the day we had that conversation. Sorry she had been terminally ill, sorry the world is as harsh and unfair as it is, sorry his best friend in the world is dead.

But not sorry out of responsibility or guilt. At least, that’s what I would have said, but I’d have been violating one of my basic tenets of parenting. Because I would have been lying to him.

I wrote it, in part, to understand myself. But I published it in the hopes that it will help someone, some day, understand a bereaved friend or relative a little bit better…or possibly even themselves.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/26/the-guilt-i-carry/feed/0Witnesshttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/09/witness/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/09/witness/#commentsWed, 10 Jun 2015 03:22:04 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3321I’m writing this as Game 3 of the NBA Finals is playing downtown, not knowing how it’s going. The Cavaliers may be up by 30, or down by 30; it doesn’t actually matter to me either way. I’m not much of a sports fan, truth be told.

But I am a Cleveland fan.

I’ve lived here more than half my life now, after a rootless early childhood and then a semi-rural upbringing. I came here for college, way back in the late 1980s, and never left. Never wanted to leave. The opportunities were there, but I never took them. When Netscape came to me and asked if I wanted to be a Standards Evangelist, I told them only if I could do it without relocating. They said yes. I told Google the same thing about a decade later; they said no.

Something about this city got into me, and didn’t let go. We have our problems, sure. You’ve heard some of them on the news. Everywhere has problems. I hope we can fix ours, and I hope other places can fix theirs. Either way, I have long been proud to call Cleveland home, as I will for years to come.

Most of my friends are incredibly excited about the Cavaliers. Deliriously so, some of them. It’s pretty awesome to experience, even secondhand. So I’ve been reading about how the first two games of the finals went, and in them, I recognized something very familiar.

From what I’ve read, pretty much nobody outside the 216 gave the Cavs any real chance in this series. The Golden State Warriors were judged to be simply too powerful. And yet, Game 1 went into overtime, where the Cavs lost steam and one of their star players to injury. Everyone (outside Cleveland, that is) said that was it. The Cavs made it a great game, they said, but being down to one star player was the end of their run. After which, Game 2 went to overtime, and the Cavs won it by a razor-thin margin.

That’s Cleveland in a nutshell.

This is a city that is constantly underestimated and derided, but we already know our faults, and we know our strengths. There’s a core of steel under the bruised and battered skin. Just like the Cavs. Down to one headline player, they managed to force overtime and pull a win on the home court of the team that everyone said they couldn’t beat. The Grit Squad, they’re calling themselves now. People are saying the LeBron has taken a team of players that shouldn’t be this good and made them into a force. That may well be, and if so, LeBron stands to make far more as Coach James than he ever will as King James.

America loves an underdog, but it also loves to dump on Cleveland, so I have no idea how sports fans around the country have seen this series. What I know now is that, win or lose, the Cavaliers have shown the rest of the country what this city is really like, and for that alone they’ve earned my respect. I think they deserve the same from anyone who’s witnessed what they’ve done.

So Game 3 is underway, probably close to done or even finished by now. I have no idea if it was another squeaker or a blowout, nor who won. As soon as I publish this, I’ll go check on how things went. For the sake of all my friends, I hope the Cavs made it a win in their first Finals home game—but however things turned out, I’m sure The Q was bedlam tonight as the fans celebrate not just being in the finals, but the spirit of the team that embodies this city I call home.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/09/witness/feed/2Afterimagehttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/07/afterimage-2/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/07/afterimage-2/#commentsSun, 07 Jun 2015 20:30:02 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3311
I remember her last breaths.
I remember how she methodically ate every last scrap of frosting from her birthday cupcake.
I remember her eating Sasa fries and looking with affection at little Joey, who’d come to her last meal.
I remember the last sentence she ever spoke.
I remember her singing and blowing out the candles at her sixth birthday party.
I remember her many laughs—gleeful with mischief, wild with delight, brimming with amusement.
I remember how her whole body shook when she laughed.
I remember how ticklish she was, and how much she loved being tickled.
I remember when she had finally grown enough that her fingers could interlace with mine when we held hands.
I remember the quiver of her lip as we told her there was no special medicine.
I remember her screaming “YES!!!” when we told her we’d bought season passes to Cedar Point.
I remember how she would oppose and defy us even when it cost her something she wanted.
I remember how she insisted on doing everything herself, insisting she needed no help even when she clearly did.
I remember how she would respond to my jokes in a flat, unimpressed voice: “Seriously?”
I remember how she’d cheat at every game and laugh about it as she did.
I remember playing air hockey with her.
I remember how much she loved to wear sparkly princess dresses.
I remember snowflakes stuck in her curly hair.
I remember her sticking her tongue out at me.
I remember her learning to read and write her name.
I remember how she nearly always threw up a hand to block me taking pictures of her.
I remember her painting her own nails for the first time.
I remember how much she loved to have her face painted.
I remember her squealing with delight when we told the kids we were going to Disney World.
I remember sitting on the porch roof with her and her siblings, watching the clouds and waving to people on the sidewalk below.
I remember her arms locked tight around my neck in a squeezy hug.
I remember her snuggled into my lap as I read her a book.
I remember her huddled against me and flinching every time a firework burst.
I remember how she would nod her head with studied nonchalance and say in an offhand, half-dismissive tone, “Yeah, cool, Dad.”
I remember how much she loved and looked up to and emulated her big sister.
I remember how much she loved and played with and protected her little brother.
I remember how she loved watermelon so much she’d eat half a melon by herself and then say she was too full for dinner.
I remember how she danced through life at every turn.
I remember her unbounded joy.
I remember how her body strained against my arms when I had to restrain her, to keep her from hitting, screaming her defiance until I wore her down.
I remember how she jumped waves at the beach, flinging herself into the air with no thought of how she would land, no concern except to jump over the crest as high as possible.
I remember her shouting “Watch me!” before jumping from the pool’s edge to her mother’s arms.
I remember how much she loved to splash in any pool or a puddle or any body of water.
I remember her playing in a big box of styrofoam packing peanuts, shrieking with delight.
I remember how she would grab my thumbs and climb up my front until she was standing on my shoulders, giggling all the way.
I remember her nestled into a sling on her mother’s back, peeking out at the world with a sly grin.
I remember how she used to carefully stick a raspberry on each fingertip before eating them one at a time, again and again.
I remember her feeding a giraffe.
I remember how much she loved coffee.
I remember her throwing rings at the bottles on the boardwalk.
I remember her trying to wash the dishes when she was barely tall enough to stand on a stepstool and see into the sink.
I remember her sitting in the car at the sledding hill, warming her hands against the air grating and waiting for us to be done.
I remember how she always wanted to drive the car.
I remember how she waited for her first birthday party to take her first steps, so she’d have as big an audience as possible.
I remember how she would call to her sister: “Lerlyn! Ah ooo?”
I remember her sister stamping the papers that finalized her adoption.
I remember the gleam in her two-week-old eyes that made me call her “Little Spark”.
I remember how wide and clear her big brown eyes always were.
I remember the first time I ever saw her, asleep in a car seat in a trailer home in a park in the middle of a cornfield in the middle of Ohio.
I remember how joyful I was when I picked her up and nestled her in my arms.
I remember how scared I was.
I remember.
]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/07/afterimage-2/feed/5Spring Airhttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/06/spring-air/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/06/spring-air/#commentsSat, 06 Jun 2015 20:20:51 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3302I’m sitting on the love seat on my front porch. It’s a beautiful spring day, the blue sky flecked with a few wispy clouds—certainly not enough to dim the sun’s warmth even when they do drift in front of it. There’s a slight breeze stirring the clean June air, almost but not quite cool enough in the shade to call for a sweatshirt.

The feel of the air on my skin, the smell of spring, the sounds of the neighborhood, the sun and temperature, all exactly the same as they were one year ago today, and the combined sense of parallel and divergence is intense.

We had just started our meeting with the rabbi, upstairs in the library, beginning to discuss the details of the memorial service we knew we could not avoid, when our friends shouted up in panicked voices that something was wrong with Rebecca. By the time we reached the porch, she was almost unconscious. There had been a seizure, a small one, but we assumed it was the first of many. We called the hospice nurse and then Kat and I sat to either side of her on the love seat, snuggling in close. For more than an hour, Rebecca seemed to be asleep, and yet was, at some level, still aware. When Kat tried to shift her arm, Rebecca reached up, never even opening her eyes, to pull it back around her shoulders.

So we kept talking to her, telling her how much we loved her, how much everyone loved her, going through all their names again and again. Telling her stories about herself, favorite memories of hers and ours. Telling her we were with her all the way to end, all of us together. Telling her that she could stop fighting. Telling her she could go.

She never stirred, except to make sure Kat’s arm stayed around her. And after an hour or two, even that ceased. Her body was completely limp, her breath steady but slow and getting slower.

We were sure she was going to die that sunny spring afternoon, in the shade of our porch, surrounded by our love, just shy of turning six.

And then, late in the afternoon, she suddenly stirred and sat up, her eyes open. “Hey,” I said to her, and I remember how my voice was filled with wonder and surprise. “Hey there, Little Spark. Did you take a nap?”

She nodded.

“Would you like to go to dinner?”

Another nod. She had already spoken her last words, hours before.

“What would you like? Sasa fries?”

Nod. This one might have been a tiny bit more energetic.

So we and some of those who had assembled headed to Rebecca’s favorite restaurant in the world, owned by our friends, the place every one of our kids had come for their first meal outside of the house. Rebecca had her favorite meal: a Japanese cream soda, some miso soup with extra tofu, and the Sasa fries. She was able to carefully drink the soda from a sake cup by herself, and eat the fries, slowly, one at a time. The soup required some assistance.

Back home that evening, we got birthday cupcakes ready. It wasn’t her birthday until the next day, June 7th, but all day we had been doing birthday things—favorite breakfast, dinner at Sasa, cupcakes—because we were afraid she wouldn’t be there the next day, and we figured that if she was, we’d just do it all again. Homemade cinnamon rolls every morning, Sasa and cupcakes every night, for however many days were left.

There were none.

I came into the living room to find Rebecca and Carolyn asleep, snuggled against each other on the sofa. I kept silent and just watched them sleep, experiencing a bittersweetness beyond any I had imagined.

Then the cupcakes were brought in, and Rebecca woke up to see the lit candle in hers and to have us sing her “Happy Birthday”. There was no expression on her face as she stared at the flame, no flicker of emotion. She just stared as we blew out the flame for her, her face like a mask that hid our daughter.

But she ate the whole cupcake, and every bit of frosting, slowly and methodically scraping every last scrap off the plate and licking it from her fingers. When it was done, I asked if she was ready for bed, and at her nod led her to the stairs. She put a hand on the banister and walked up the stairs on her own, holding my hand without actually needing it.

I felt a small sliver of hope at that, until I realized that throughout all the frosting and stair-climbing, the teeth-brushing and changing for bed, being snuggled under the covers, her expression still never changed. No joy, no excitement, no annoyance, no anger. Nothing.

I was so incredibly proud of her, though. She was so exhausted, and yet she insisted on doing as much as she could by herself. The mask of her face may have hidden her emotions, but her fire was still as clear as ever. I was humbled beyond measure.

Kat read Rebecca her favorite stories for the last time.

Tomorrow will be the first anniversary of her death, the day she would have turned seven years old. I sit on the porch, and all my senses tell me that day has come again. It is so incredibly alike, and yet so different, sitting here on the love seat in the cool June breeze without my Little Spark.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/06/spring-air/feed/13The Beginning of the Endhttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/03/the-beginning-of-the-end/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/03/the-beginning-of-the-end/#commentsWed, 03 Jun 2015 21:54:48 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3298One year ago today, it had been two days since Rebecca’s birthday party, held jointly with her best friend Ruthie, who not only shared her initials but was also four days older than her. We had celebrated them both with a donut van and a balloon maker and the Rocket Car, which Rebecca rode at least four times. It was completely over the top, but she was still with us, after ten months of treatments, even with the new tumor in her head, and that was worth celebrating. Kat and I also decided to go all-out because we didn’t believe she’d ever have another birthday party. A CT scan a few weeks before had indicated that the tumor had stopped growing, but each day she was getting more and more tired.

Except for her great big birthday party. She was in better spirits than she had been for weeks, just for that day. People commented on how much better she seemed, and when they confidently asserted that of course she would beat this, we smiled and didn’t say what we really thought. Kat and I would occasionally share a glance, as people poured their optimism over us: Do they not understand what’s happening here? Sharing our secret language of fear and pain, the way other couples share a secret language of love.

The day after the party, Rebecca was more tired than ever, barely speaking for hours at a time and increasingly distant. So now we sat in a waiting room in the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, our study site, waiting with two of our best friends for the results from her latest MRI, wondering if we were being paranoid or prescient, not wanting to know.

The lead doctor came into the examination room alone, clutching a folder to his chest like it was a life vest, and we knew. He started to speak, but we interrupted, asking if Rebecca could go play with the Child Life counselor, because we knew. Of course she could, and she did, heading off with the counselor to the play room, leaving our side for the last time.

“I don’t have good news,” the doctor said, wincing a little, apology in his voice.

We knew.

I remember only a few fragments of what he said. “Significantly larger” and “many flare sites”. I remember thinking that they hadn’t even bothered to count them, there were so many. Tumors coming, everywhere, all throughout her brain, the brain that was already being slowly squeezed by the enormous tumor we thought had been stopped. All our dreams of extended time with her, of trying to find a way to roll back the runaway growth, shattered.

And then: “A few weeks at the most.”

We knew.

Our little girl, dying. The end of hope.

“I’m so sorry, you guys.”

We knew.

As we drove away from the hospital, each of us sunken deep into our horror and despair, a torrential burst of rain hammered the roof of the van, overpowering the wipers even on high, all the while bathed in direct sunlight. All the components for an incredible double or even triple rainbow—except the sun was too high in the sky.

Rebecca sat silent and still in the back seat, staring straight ahead, glowing in the rain-muted sunlight, never stirring even to ask where the rainbow was, let alone look around for it.

She had four days left to live.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/06/03/the-beginning-of-the-end/feed/6Into Each Lifehttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/31/into-each-life/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/31/into-each-life/#commentsMon, 01 Jun 2015 01:37:30 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3292It was the end-of-the-school-year picnic at the local elementary school, and we were invited. Not because we have any students there right now, but because it was Rebecca’s school, and the PTA was set to dedicate a Little Free Library in honor of her and Trishka Tantanella-Holcomb, another student who died in 2014, a few months before Rebecca.

There were some words spoken, readings read, and then the Library unveiled. I shook the hand of Trishka’s mother, expressing my condolences, and then I found myself locked in an embrace with Trishka’s father, taller than me, his breath hitching.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

He sobbed in my ear, quietly, despondently. We stood back a step.

“Every day,” I said, looking into his eyes, my throat tight.

He shakily held up a finger. “Not… not one day,” he ground out.

We turned to look at the new Library, adorned with the names of our little girls, hands on each other’s shoulders. Kids and adults alike were putting in books they had brought to contribute, one after another. Someone decided they’d had enough of the raucous pile of books, and started standing them on their ends, sorted by size. I could imagine Rebecca saying, “Aw, boo!” in the casual, lighthearted way she liked to say it. Expressing her disapproval, but without any heat to it.

A storm was moving in, so the crowd scattered back to their homes as a few of us quickly broke down the tables and sound equipment to move them inside. The storm arrived just as we finished, filling the now-empty playground with curtains of rain, racing with the wind. A minor lake immediately began to form as the playground’s storm drain was overwhelmed by the outpouring. I thought about the video Kat had taken of Rebecca and her best friend Ruthie playing in another such lake, a little more than a year before, splashing and laughing as they poured water out of their rain boots.

As quickly as it had broken, the storm was over, the rain trailing off to a minor sprinkle. I looked at the clouds to the west, realized what was about to happen, and fished my iPhone out of my pocket as I turned around.

“Get the kids outside,” I told Kat, who’d gone home with them ahead of the storm. “There’s going to be a rainbow.”

I waited. But not for long. It slowly coalesced over the school, the first full-spectrum, full-arc rainbow I’d seen since a few months before Rebecca’s death.

She loved rainbows.

I wish so many things, all of them pointlessly, but one of the most piercing is that I wish I’d thought to make a rainbow for her while there was still time. All it would have taken was a late afternoon and a garden hose, sprayed from the porch roof; all it would have taken was for me to break free of myself just long enough to think of it. Just one more rainbow, just for her, just to see her eyes widen and her mouth arc upward in delight.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/31/into-each-life/feed/4Rebecca’s Gifthttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/08/rebeccas-gift/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/08/rebeccas-gift/#commentsFri, 08 May 2015 18:01:56 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3275Rebecca’s Gift, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to providing healing family vacations after the death of a child.]]>Yesterday was the eleven-month anniversary of Rebecca’s death. I’ve been trying not to focus on those monthly anniversaries, but this one stuck out for me. Because in a month—thirty days, as I write this—it will be both the first anniversary of her death, and the day she would have turned seven.

I haven’t really written directly about the grieving process since late March, because it’s been in a stable pattern and nothing has really changed. Kat and I still grapple on occasion with the question of whether this is a nightmare or a post-dream. Are we having a nightmare that our daughter died, and we’ll finally wake up; or did we dream that we had a middle daughter, and have since woken up? Of course neither is true. She came to us, and grew, and died. It’s just so hard to come to peace or acceptance or even just comprehension that the mind hunts for an escape hatch, some way of making some part of it not true.

Don’t take this as intimation that we spend every waking second in agony, paralyzed by grief and shock. Those periods of irreality and escape-seeking are just that: periods of time. Not all the time. Most of each day, I function normally, and honestly don’t think about what happened. There’s work to do, projects to start or complete, errands to run, books to read, kids to raise. These things all take precedence in their own ways, and Kat and I are both committed to being as present as possible in our lives. We don’t deny what happened, but we don’t fetishize it, either. Life cannot stop because a life stopped. It’s not how either of us could live, even for ourselves, and we have more than ourselves to consider.

Some days are more difficult than others, of course, but for whom is that not true? We all get through life one day at a time.

One of the things that has really helped us as a family, and Kat and me as parents, has been to go on family vacations. Some went better than others. A short trip we took to Amish Country in late July of 2014 was probably too soon. Our annual August trip to New Jersey, coming as it did on the first anniversary of Rebecca falling ill, was both helpful and difficult; and maybe the difficulty was part of what made it helpful. The trip we took to Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge just after Christmas was just about right, in terms of timing, and was definitely a huge boost to us emotionally.

These escapes from the normal routine of home and calendar, where we could just concentrate on being together and doing things together and not having any particular demands on us, were incredibly helpful to the healing process. Friends told us after our trips that we seemed more relaxed, less haunted. The time we spent together helped us figure out how to be a new family, without all the distractions and chores of everyday life.

The other thing that Kat and I in particular appreciated about our trips is how we could make Carolyn and Joshua the center of the experience. When Rebecca was being treated, and then when she was dying, we did what we could to make Carolyn and Joshua feel not marginalized, but there was no way to avoid it. Mommy and Daddy went on a two-month trip to Philadelphia with Rebecca, not them. We went with her to the hospital, not them. We worried about her temperature and bruising level and energy, not theirs. People made banners and posters and cards and healing stars for Rebecca, not them. Friends and family came to see us because of Rebecca’s cancer, not because of them. Make-A-Wish granted Rebecca’s wish, not theirs. People came to pay respects to the memory of Rebecca’s life, not the ongoing reality of their lives.

How could they not feel marginalized?

Kat and I worried about this all the way through, guided to some degree by the insights I had from my own childhood, and tried to counter it as best we could. Kat went on theater dates with Carolyn, and lunch dates with Joshua. I played games they liked, and took them to parties. Regardless, they knew what weighed most on our minds, and we never tried to deceive them or tell them they were wrong.

But those trips, after Rebecca was dead, could be all about them. They were central again. We went to the Jersey shore, and did old favorite activities as well as tried new things. We went to Disney and granted their wishes as best we could, getting them to special character events and letting them stay up to watch the fireworks. We took them to the museums and shops and ski slopes in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, picking the things they wanted to try out. We made them feel special again.

You can’t imagine how great a gift that is, both for them and for us, unless you’ve been through this yourself.

That’s a gift that Kat and our good friend Karla want to give to families who are going through this.

That’s why, a week ago today, they launched Rebecca’s Gift, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to providing healing family vacations after the death of a child. Rebecca’s Gift is accepting donations in support of that mission, and has its first fundraiser scheduled for this November.

Their goal is to raise enough money to send two or three families on healing trips in the summer of 2016; that is, summer of next year. At first, the scope of Rebecca’s Gift will be narrow by necessity: eligible families will be those who had a child die of cancer between six and 24 months before the trip is taken, and who have surviving children age 18 or younger. Rebecca’s Gift will work with partner organizations to identify families who need this support. They don’t plan to take on anything more ambitious than that to start, in order to make sure those first trips are everything they can be.

As for the future, we’ll see. The hope is that this will one day be open to more than a few families per year, open to families whose child died from something other than cancer, and perhaps open to parents who have no other children. If Rebecca’s Gift grows strong enough to do those things, then I feel confident they will. Those are all questions for the future. For now, they’re focused on making sure they can help families who need the same time away to reconnect, rebuild, and relax. Even if it’s just for a few days.

If you can help, I know your support will be welcome.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/08/rebeccas-gift/feed/3Warning Hashflagshttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/05/warning-hashflags/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/05/warning-hashflags/#commentsTue, 05 May 2015 19:41:16 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3270Over the weekend, I published “Time and Emotion” on The Pastry Box, in which I pondered the way we’re creating the data that the data-miners of the future will use to (literally) thoughtlessly construct emotional minefields—if we don’t work to turn away from that outcome.

The way I introduced the topic was by noting the calendar coincidence of the Star Wars-themed tradition of “May the Fourth be with you” and the anniversary of the Kent State shootings in 1970, and how I observe the latter while most of the internet celebrates the former: by tweeting some song lyrics with a relevant hashtag, #maythe4th. I did as I said I would…and Twitter blindly added a layer of commentary with a very simple little content filter. On twitter.com and in the official Twitter app, a little Stormtrooper helmet was inserted after the hashtag #maythe4th.

So let’s review: I tweeted in remembrance of a group of National Guardsmen firing into a crowd of college students, wounding nine and killing four. After the date hashtag, there appeared a Stormtrooper icon. To someone who came into it cold, that could easily read as a particularly tasteless joke-slash-attack, equating the Guardsmen with a Nazi paramilitary group by way of Star Wars reference. While some might agree with that characterization, it was not my intent. The meaning of what I wrote was altered by an unthinking algorithm. It imposed on me a rhetorical position that I do not hold.

In a like vein, Thijs Reijgersberg pointed out that May 4th is Remembrance of the Dead Day in the Netherlands, an occasion to honor those who died in conflict since the outbreak of World War II. He did so on Twitter, using the same hashtag I had, and again got a Stormtrooper helmet inserted into his tweet. A Stormtrooper as part of a tweet about the Dutch remembrance of their war dead from World War II on. That’s…troublesome.

You might think that this is all a bit much, because all you have to do is avoid using the hashtag, or Twitter altogether. Those are solutions, but they’re not very useful solutions. They require humans to alter their behavior to accommodate code, rather than expecting code to accommodate humans; and furthermore, they require that humans have foreknowledge. I didn’t know the hashtag would get an emoji before I did it. And, because it only shows up in some methods of accessing Twitter, there’s every chance I wouldn’t have known it was there, had I not used twitter.com to post. Can you imagine if someone sent a tweet out, found themselves attacked for tweeting in poor taste, and couldn’t even see what was upsetting people?

And, as it happens, even #may4th wasn’t safe from being hashflagged, as Twitter calls it, though that was different: it got a yellow droid’s top dome (I assume BB-8) rather than a Stormtrooper helmet. The droid doesn’t have nearly the same historical baggage (yet), but it still risks making a user look like they’re being mocking or silly in a situation where the opposite was intended. If they tagged a remembrance of the 2007 destruction of Greensburg, Kansas with #may4th, for example.

For me, it was a deeply surreal way to make the one of the points I’d been talking about in my Pastry Box article. We’re designing processes that alter people’s intended meaning by altering content and thus adding unwanted context, code that throws pieces of data together without awareness of meaning and intent, code that will synthesize emotional environments effectively at random. Emergent patterns are happening entirely outside our control, and we’re not even thinking about the ways we thoughtlessly cede that control. We’re like toddlers throwing tinted drinking glasses on the floor to see the pretty sparkles, not thinking about how the resulting beauty might slice someone’s foot open.

We don’t need to stop writing code. We do need to start thinking.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/05/05/warning-hashflags/feed/7Heard and Receivedhttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/04/29/heard-and-received/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/04/29/heard-and-received/#commentsWed, 29 Apr 2015 18:45:16 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3261told a couple thousand developers they were doing it wrong]]>A week ago today, I stood on a stage in San Francisco and told a couple thousand developers they were doing it wrong. I mean, I got up there at O’Reilly’s Fluent, The Web Platfom conference, and gave a talk with a slide that literally said, “The Web is NOT a Platform”. You can see it here, all fifteen minutes of it, in which I borrowed liberally from Jeremy Keith, added a splash of Mike Monteiro, and mixed it all together with things I’ve been saying and thinking for the past, oh, decade or more.

As it turned out, and a little bit to my surprise, a fair number of people completely agreed with what I had to say, judging by the reactions I got both online and in person. Only a few people disagreed with me in person, which was fine; I actually hoped that there would be some pushback, since I’m not the smartest person in the world by any stretch. The best part was, our disagreements were friendly, well-sourced, and collegial. I love having conversations like that. I don’t know that any of us changed our minds, but we were able to test our assumptions and viewpoints against each other. In one case, I shook hands on a friendly, no-stakes bet over which of us would prove to be right, five or ten years down the line.

What made it really fun is that not twenty minutes after I stepped off the stage at the end of that talk, I stepped back on to accept a 2015 Web Platform Award alongside Sara Soueidan, Mark Nottingham, and Mikeal Rogers. Those are some amazing people to stand with, and that it came from O’Reilly made it even more humbling. In fact, Sara said it best: “This is my first time ever winning a web award, and I feel privileged to have won it from such a prestigious company.” To which I would only add, and in such prestigious company.

I do want to note that what I said at the very end of my acceptance remarks was woefully insufficient. What I should have said, and would have said if I hadn’t suddenly felt completely overwhelmed, is that the web has meant more to me, done more for me, and given more to me in the past two years than any one person could ever have any right to expect. The web and what it makes possible, the ability to reach out and share and hear from you and stay in touch—that kept me sane, and may very well have kept me alive.

Thank you all.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/04/29/heard-and-received/feed/2Talk Talkhttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/04/15/talk-talk/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/04/15/talk-talk/#commentsWed, 15 Apr 2015 15:43:32 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3251If you prefer hearing voice to reading text, I was on a couple of podcasts recently and would like to share; also, I have some live appearances coming up soon.

The first podcast is a 16-minute segment on the eHealth Radio Network, talking about designing for crisis. This was recorded shortly before AEA Seattle and HxRefactored, which is why I talk about HxRefactored in the future tense. Much as was the case with my talk at HxRefactored, this concentrates on the topic of designing for crisis in a medical/health care context, and as it turns out, it’s only slightly shorter than was my HxR talk.

The second is both longer and a bit more recent: I talked for an hour with Chris and Dave at Shop Talk Show about flexbox, inline layout, the difficulties of the past two years, and how I’ve changed professionally. It doesn’t shy away from the emotional side, and some listeners have described it as “heart-rending” and “sobering”. So, you know, fair warning. On the other hand, I call Chris Coyier a “newb” about a minute in, so there’s that.

In the Shop Talk episode, we talk briefly about Facebook’s On This Day feature, which had just launched but I hadn’t seen at that point. Yesterday, it finally popped up in my Facebook timeline. I had observations, and will probably write about them soon. First, though, I need to finish up my slides for Fluent, where I’ll be giving my talk “This Web App Best Viewed By Someone Else”. I get 13 minutes to tell the audience that they… well, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. (Plus there’s another slide deck I need to finish up for next week, but that’s for a private engagement, so never mind that now.)

In May, I’ll once again be presenting the hour-long version of “Designing for Crisis” at An Event Apart Boston. There are still some seats left if you’d care to join us; it’s a pretty great lineup, and as usual I’m feeling a wee bit intimidated by the brilliance. Attendees have been telling us that this year’s lineup is one of the best they’ve seen, making AEA worth every penny and then some, so you’d get way more out of the show than just hearing me.

In case you’re wondering (and I also mentioned this on ShopTalk), I won’t be at AEA San Diego in June. Part of me very much wants to be, but an accident of scheduling made it inadvisable: the show starts June 8th, the day after the first anniversary of Rebecca’s death and what would have been her seventh birthday. I don’t know that I’ll be in any shape to hold brief conversation, let alone stand on stage in front of a few hundred people and give an hour-long talk, in the days immediately following. Rather than risk it, we (the AEA team and I) decided to have someone else take my place at the San Diego show, and that show only. I intend to be at all our other shows this year.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to write about attending not-web-design conferences in the near future. I find such experiences entertainingly, and in some ways refreshingly, different. I recommend it.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/04/15/talk-talk/feed/0Playing Shivahttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/03/23/playing-shiva/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/03/23/playing-shiva/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 15:11:12 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3230Children charged through our house, laughing and shrieking and calling to each other as their games shifted fluidly from one imaginative burst to another. In the dining room, their adults sat around the table and talked, benignly ignoring the chaos around them. Earlier, there had been a group photo of the kids and rides in a crazily-painted convertible.

I sat in the kitchen window seat, my feet braced against the middle frame, staring out into the back yard. The afternoon was chilly and bright but not sunny, as befits March in Cleveland, but I didn’t really see it. I only know what the weather was like because I’ve gone back to look at the photos of that day. Whatever light was entering my eyes and falling on my retinas wasn’t leaving any impression in my brain; I was focused somewhere unseeable, trying not to think about the unthinkable.

A hand on my arm snapped me back. Rebecca stood next to me, her expression clouded and frowning.

“Hey there, Little Spark. What’s up?”

She climbed wordlessly into my lap and curled up against my chest, her back to the window. She rested a cheek in a cupped palm that pressed on my sternum, looking unseeingly into the kitchen, still pensive. The chaos was downstairs in the play room now, distant and muted. I circled my arms around her curled frame, gently pressing her to me, listening to and feeling her breath draw in and out.

I knew she was upset, and I knew just as certainly that she wanted to talk about it. I was far less certain that I wanted to hear it, but this wasn’t about me. It never had been, and it was far less so now.

“What are you thinking, sweetie?” I asked after a few moments.

“I’m scared that my brain cancer won’t go away and I will get dead,” she quavered miserably.

Suddenly I was hugging her tightly, my face half-buried in the bright blue shmata she wore on her head, tears coursing from my eyes.

“Me too,” I choked out. “I’m scared too, honey. Mommy and I are both scared. It’s okay to be scared.”

We wept quietly together, curled up on the window seat.

I had been crying a lot at that point. Three nights before, after all the kids had gone to sleep, I had stumbled into Kat’s and my bedroom, collapsed on the bed, and sobbed without stopping for more than an hour. At some points, I wept so intensely that Kat tried to get me to take medication to calm myself, afraid that I was about to literally choke to death on my own sorrow. Part of me wanted that to happen.

Because earlier that day, we had been told that another tumor had emerged. As soon as the doctors walked into the room, we knew from their body language that the news wasn’t good. When they asked Rebecca if she would go play with the Child Life specialist while Mommy and Daddy talked to the doctors, we knew it was bad. I felt the blood drain from my face as I reached out to take Kat’s hand in mine, both of us staring at the lead doctor and still trying to hope that it wasn’t as bad as we feared.

It was.

The previous August, the doctors in Philadelphia had told us the tumor was essentially completely removed, and that a long course of radiation and chemotherapy could, possibly, prevent a recurrence of the cancer that had almost killed our daughter. They didn’t give odds. They didn’t have too many assurances to give us, save one. They could pretty well assure us that if the cancer came back, all we could do was watch Rebecca die.

Now it was March 20th, almost exactly seven months from the day she had first seized. We had gotten her through multiple surgeries, two months of treatments in a city far from her home, and then weekly chemotherapy back home. Holidays had come, her MRIs had been clear, we’d returned to a relative normalcy. The nightmare had engulfed us, then receded.

Now it engulfed us again, more complete than ever. For those seven months, I had held my fears in abeyance. Now there was no dam to hold them back.

I lay in my bed, almost screaming my sorrow, choking and nearly convulsing, as I tried to cope with the certainty that our little girl was going to die soon, and there was no hope left. Although she would ultimately prove me wrong, because of course she would, I tried to come to terms with my desolate conviction that Rebecca wouldn’t even graduate kindergarten, let alone turn six.

That night, I started to mourn my child’s death.

Within a minute or two, Rebecca was done crying and starting to get restless to rejoin the chaos. I paused my own grief, wiped the tears from both our faces, and gave her kisses. She smiled at me and climbed off my lap.

Five minutes later, she charged through the kitchen with her friends, the kids she’d shared a playgroup with since they were newborns, shrieking and laughing along with them, because to be five years old is to live completely in the moment.

They thundered onward, down the steps to the back hall and up the stairs to the sun room and on to the living room. I listened to her bright, sunny voice echoing from across the house, drew in a deep breath, wiped away my tears, and resolved to live in the moment as much as I could. For her, and for me.

That night, after the kids were asleep, Kat and I stood in the kitchen, cleaning and putting away the last few dishes left over from the play date. We talked about the day, how much fun all the kids had had, and shared our mutual admiration of our friends, who had brought their children to play with our child, knowing how that would sharpen their kids’ pain when Rebecca’s death came.

“Thank you for letting me fill the house with people,” Kat said. “I know it’s tough for you sometimes, having that much noise and activity.”

I shrugged. It didn’t seem to matter. Very little did, at that point.

“Do you understand why I wanted them all here today?” she asked.

“You were sitting shiva for her,” I heard myself say, distantly surprised by the words as they emerged.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “How did you know?”

“I’ve known you for seventeen years now.”

“I was sitting shiva for her while she’s still alive. How fucked up is that?”

I shook my head mutely. Tears streaked both our faces.

In the year since that day, a year ago today, I’ve come to realize what an incredible gift it was for Rebecca. To bring all those kids and adults who loved her so much into the house, all those people she’d known and loved all her too-short life—to give her a day of play and fun and craziness, the kind of craziness she loved, while she was still able to enjoy it—what better form of mourning could there be?

Rebecca knew, long before I did, possibly even before Kat did, why her friends were there. She mourned the truth, and then had a fantastic day anyway.

I may have been far older than her, but she was far, far wiser than me.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/03/23/playing-shiva/feed/11Big Little Heroeshttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/03/06/big-little-heroes/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/03/06/big-little-heroes/#commentsFri, 06 Mar 2015 17:58:28 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3216On March 15th, 2015, there will be a St. Baldrick’s Foundation fundraising event at the Cleveland Heights Community Center. At last year’s event, Rebecca was there, running around and flipping out (in a good way) as her sister Carolyn shaved to raise money. She gave a big hug to her kindergarten teacher, who had shown up to surprise her and had his head shaved as well. She was, to all appearances, a totally normal and healthy kid, so full of life that many people there didn’t realize she was one of the honorees.

Four days later was the MRI that revealed the second tumor, the one that killed her two months later.

This year, Carolyn will not be shaving her head, though she is again captaining the team for her elementary school. In her place, Rebecca’s best friends in the world—the kids from her infant playgroup, as well as her friend Ruth—will be cutting their hair or shaving their heads to raise money in Rebecca’s honor. If you want to make a difference in their lives, as well as the lives of children who have or will one day have cancer, please consider donating to one or all of these brave kids:

Some of them took years to grow enough hair to comb, let alone braid. And yet, even at their ages, they are willing to sacrifice that hair in order to do something positive. We are so, so grateful to them all.

Rebecca being fierce, July 20th, 2013. Her first tumor, which was already present in this picture, was discovered a month later.

We are also very grateful to St. Baldrick’s for working with us over the past few months to establish The Rebecca Alison Meyer Fund for Pediatric Cancer Research. This “Hero Fund” is specifically designed to fund promising research into the prevention of tumor reemergence, as well as glioblastoma research in general. As we say on the Fund’s page:

We were told after [Rebecca’s] first tumor was biopsied that if another tumor appeared, all we could do was watch her die. There were no studies to try to prevent the reoccurrence of the tumor. Once it did recur, there were very limited study options, none of which were life saving—only life prolonging. This is typical of so many types of tumors.

You cannot imagine, unless you’ve lived it, what it’s like to know that your child has a rapidly deteriorating terminal condition about which nothing can be done. There are no words to describe it. “Helpless” doesn’t begin to come close. We hope that Rebecca’s Fund can, in whatever way, however small, help even one family avoid that nightmare. We hope it can help many, many families avoid it.

You can donate directly to Rebecca’s Fund if you prefer, but please note that all funds raised for the March 15th Cleveland Heights event will be counted as part Rebecca’s Fund. So please, if you’re inclined to support the Fund, donate to one or all of Rebecca’s friends listed above, because donating to them means donating to the Fund as well. Thank you.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/03/06/big-little-heroes/feed/0The Widening Gulfhttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/02/15/the-widening-gulf/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/02/15/the-widening-gulf/#commentsSun, 15 Feb 2015 15:14:11 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3208So many people who knew Rebecca told us how they had to hold back tears, watching the Super Bowl halftime show. “I wish Rebecca could have seen it,” they say. “When Katy Perry sang ‘Firework’, all I could think is how much Rebecca would have loved it.”

Rebecca loved Katy Perry songs, you see. She loved to sing and dance to “Firework”, so much so that her sister Carolyn made it part of the medley she arranged and performed at Rebecca’s funeral. And Rebecca loved to sing “Roar”, and pretty much anything from Katy Perry. Even “Brave”, which is actually sung by Sara Bareilles, but when your terminally ill daughter tells you a song is by Katy Perry, then it’s by Katy Perry.

But all I can think is, I wish I could be so sure.

Because yes, five-year-old-going-on-six Rebecca loved Katy Perry, and Frozen, and hula hoops, and so many more things. But by now she’d be six-and-two-thirds, and so much can change so fast at that age. By now, maybe she’d have moved on to Taylor Swift, and Katy Perry would be so last year. She might be done with Frozen, and instead be into Big Hero Six or The Emperor’s New Groove.

I know that she would be different by now, just as amazing as ever, but different. Some enthusiasms would have given way to others; her interests would have shifted. How, we don’t know. Can never know.

Every day, she becomes a little more distant from us, a little less known. A gulf slowly widens with the passing of time, and what she would be now becomes ever more uncertain. We become estranged from our own daughter, not by hurtful words or actions, but by the merciless passage of time, by the choices she never got to make, the changes she never experienced.

I knew that this would come, but for a time I could ignore it. A month or two after she died, I could still pretend that I knew how she would react, what she would think, how she would behave. Even though I never knew that with any certainty. She was never so predictable as that. Never so static.

Now it’s been too long.

And it hurts, knowing that I can never know the girl she would be now, never know the girl she would have become, never know the woman she would have been.

I miss her, sometimes more than I ever thought possible, so much that I can physically feel the absence. But sometimes I think what I miss more than the Rebecca I knew is the Rebecca I never got to know.

]]>http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/02/15/the-widening-gulf/feed/10Friday Figurehttp://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/02/13/friday-figure/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/02/13/friday-figure/#commentsFri, 13 Feb 2015 22:50:59 +0000http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/?p=3203
Just for fun, and maybe for a little bit of edification, I present to you one of the figures from the chapter on color, backgrounds, and gradients I’ve just finished writing for CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition.

This figure is (at the moment) captioned “Very, very tall ellipses”; it’s a diagram of what happens if you create a radial gradient with no horizontal sizing. (Whether you also have vertical sizing is actually irrelevant.) The ellipses all get so incredibly tall that you only see the sides at their most vertical, which results in the appearance of a mirrored horizontal linear gradient. This is of course explained in more detail in the chapter, and builds on a whole lot of previous text.

I had a much simpler version of this figure before, and shared it with Sara Soueidan, who had some very smart feedback that helped me get to what you see above. The figure was finished not too long before i posted it; once it was done, I realized really liked the look, so decided on the spur of the moment to post it. Thus the late-Friday timestamp on the post.

While the figure is a PNG, it’s actually a screenshot of an HTML+CSS file displayed in a browser—Safari, in this particular case, though most are done in Firefox. All of the figures in the book will be created using HTML+CSS whenever possible. Doing so lets me make sure I understand what I’m illustrating, and also allows me to change the look and arrangement of figures without too much difficulty.

So that’s fun with edge cases for this Friday. If people like it, or more likely I just feel like doing it, I’ll post more in the future.